The Best American Poetry 2021 Read online

  I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,

  enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high

  water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,

  I am asking you to touch me.

  from The New Yorker

  JAMES LONGENBACH In the Village

  1.

  Shortly before I died,

  Or possibly after,

  I moved to a small village by the sea.

  You’ll recognize it, as did I, because I’ve written

  About this village before.

  The rocky sliver of land, the little houses where the fishermen once lived—

  We had everything we needed: a couple of rooms

  Overlooking the harbor,

  A small collection of books,

  Paperbacks, the pages

  Brittle with age.

  How, if I’d never seen

  The village, had I pictured it so accurately?

  How did I know we’d be happy there,

  Happier than ever before?

  The books reminded me of what,

  In our youth,

  We called literature.

  2.

  The sentences I’ve just written

  Took it out of me.

  I searched for the words,

  And I resisted them as soon as I put them down.

  Now, listening to them again, what I hear

  Is not so much nostalgia

  As a love of beginning. A wish

  Never to be removed

  From time but

  Always to be immersed in it.

  The boats come in, the boats go out—

  3.

  After a routine ultrasound revealed a fifteen-centimeter mass, my left kidney was removed robotically on February 12th. Fifteen months later, nodules were discovered in my lungs and peritoneum. Two subsequent rounds of therapy failed to impede their growth, so I enrolled in a trial, a treatment not yet FDA approved.

  Shrinkage of the tumors was immediate, as was the condensation of my sense of time: moments in my youth once distant, even irrelevant, felt burningly present. Didn’t everyone, my parents, my grandparents, grow old before they died? Then what about Tony? What about Russ? Hadn’t their lives, though long past fifty, only begun?

  I walked down High Street to the harbor, though when I say walked I mean imagined; I hadn’t been there yet.

  4.

  The Branch Will Not Break.

  A Cold Spring.

  Leaflets.

  The Lost World.

  The Moving Target.

  Nightmare Begins Responsibility.

  Rivers and Mountains.

  The Story of Our Lives.

  Untitled Subjects.

  Water Street.

  5.

  Of ghosts pursued, forgotten, sought anew—

  Everywhere I go

  The trees are full of them.

  From trees come books, that, when they open,

  Lead you to expect a person

  On the other side:

  One hand having pulled

  The doorknob

  Towards him, the other

  Held out, open,

  Beckoning

  You forward—

  6.

  Ash-blond, tall, a sweater

  Knotted by its sleeves around his neck,

  A boy is leaning on a bicycle. Deftly when she reaches him

  A girl slips to the grass, one hand straightening her skirt,

  The other tugging at the boy, who remains

  Standing, to sit beside her.

  Their heads are close

  Enough to be touching;

  Their lips are still—

  A book is the future.

  You dream

  Of reading it, and once you’ve finished, it’s a miracle, you know the past.

  The sky fills with stars. The sun

  Climbs every morning

  Over Watch Hill, dropping behind the harbor at dusk.

  Water Street runs past

  Church and Wall,

  Harmony and School,

  Until it crosses Omega, by the sea.

  from The American Poetry Review

  WARREN C. LONGMIRE Meditations on a Photograph of Historic Rail Women

  Number two from the right was an angry drunk.

  Number one from the left always held the face of a dead cousin in her left pocket.

  The third woman placed fourth in a seed spitting contest at age six.

  The first one knew she was the prettiest.

  The fifth didn’t need to know.

  The child belonging to the one on the far right worked at the general store as a bagboy.

  The first’s daughter was too rough looking. She lived to be sixty-one.

  The second woman had no children. She spent five minutes picking the right shovel. It was as black as her hands. This was not the first time she swung metal things from the waist.

  The first woman’s head-wrap was a dishrag she grabbed just before leaving.

  The second woman’s head-wrap was a gift from a long-dead suitor.

  The center woman’s head-wrap was a prop.

  The second from the left quit two days in.

  The first preferred to use a wrench.

  The center woman got the second to do her work.

  The first wouldn’t stop for all money in the world.

  Right from the center’s brother was a saint who shot himself last year.

  The fourth girl from the right gave up on God long ago.

  The fifth girl was a woman by the time she was thirteen.

  The fifth from the other side decided she would never grow up as soon as the papers were

  signed.

  I think the second had money saved but had something to prove.

  The fourth looks like a Virgo.

  The second woman was raped.

  The first woman was raped.

  At least three were raped and, during the interview, four said they once knew true love.

  A white woman slapped two for being insolent.

  The middle lady shot a nigga.

  The last woman fondled her cousin when she was young. Is that the same cousin who died?

  Is the last woman dead?

  My grandmother is eighty-six.

  I have no pictures of her, but I do know her name.

  Her name is Ruth.

  She loves God more than life.

  She calls young black men monsters each time I visit. She never leaves the house.

  She grew up on a Virginian farm.

  She is separated from but on good terms with my granddad.

  My granddad’s name is Sonny.

  My granddad can’t read.

  He would look hard at the caption for this photo of nameless women and say,

  I’m sorry, Warren.

  I don’t have my glasses on me.

  Why don’t you just tell me what it says?

  from The American Poetry Review

  EMILY LEE LUAN When My Sorrow Was Born

  after Kahlil Gibran

  When my Sorrow was born, I held it, a dark pearl spit from its shell, and I remembered the salt that had rounded it before, centuries ago, before I even had a mouth.

  And my Sorrow was unafraid and it gave me bravery and my anger back, walked me to the tossing water and proclaimed the water mine.

  My Sorrow held me and did not tell me not to cry, and the girls about me watched our sweet days together with longing, for they too wanted to be held by something with fingers as slender and delicate as my Sorrow’s, fingers that tapped their temples and had them see how they had been wronged.

  And those who longed for my Sorrow would never have a Sorrow like mine. I knew that, for my Sorrow had a forest black mane like mine.

  And my Sorrow let me say I, I, mine.

  And my Sorrow sat with me on the fire escape all that breathing winter, and my Sorrow would not let me into the water.

  And my So
rrow deveined shrimp and patterned them on my plate, brought me a wide bowl brimming with broth.

  And we ate fried eggs with chopsticks. We waited for my Joy to come.

  from New Ohio Review

  DORA MALECH All the Stops

  Rolling through the intersection, I see in my rearview

  the back of the familiar octagon rusted over, belying

  the option of following its forward-facing order.

  The driver behind me brakes just as half-heartedly,

  and for a moment I pretend together we’d make one

  whole heart’s best effort to postpone the hurt and hurtle

  past the red fur of thorn and bud beyond the shoulders

  as the season nips the next one’s heels. IF YOU CAN’T

  SEE MY MIRRORS I CAN’T SEE YOU warns the sticker

  affixed to the glint of the bumper ahead, but I’ve only got

  eyes for the peripheral blood smear shimmer where

  whatever winter took is finally kicking in. All those years

  wishing I were sure and thin as a sign and could wait

  for no mandible nor manager nor manna nor mention.

  All those years I told my charges to hold my hand

  and look both ways as I told myself to stop at nothing.

  Don’t let go. Let go. Everywhere, the referents of other

  people’s safe words—dive bars dropping paint flakes

  and first flowers face-down with the sun on their napes.

  A tinge of desperation in every command. Take it

  from me. Ahead a sky scored by some flight’s velocity,

  contrail kindred in its substance—water, pressure. Two lights

  at a complicated crossing and the capitals cry THIS IS YOUR

  SIGNAL. Sure, but there are other shapes in me, flipped

  evergreen like rare old color film and just as quick to burn.

  from The Southampton Review

  SALLY WEN MAO Playing Dead

  The first time I was touched,

  parts of me were seen:

  the nautilus, the teeth,

  the cavern of mouth, how a question

  marks the spine and then it is never

  answered

  how his seeing became my seeing

  he surprised me his finger

  slipped into

  a barren—burrows

  a bare

  contusion

  I thought I was exposed

  but unbeknownst to me,

  most parts remained unseen

  and I was to retain this unseen feeling

  most of my life

  I’ve spent apart, not a part

  of any tribe or religion or posse

  most of my life I identified with animals

  like the possum

  searching for trash or playing dead

  After this thing was done to me

  I believed I played a part in it

  an actress finds a part

  so she could slip, finally, into another skin

  my parts, these parts

  I wrote the whole thing

  off, my feelings were leaves

  that bypassed everyone and buried me

  in autumn, my seams parted

  and all I did was write a poem—an ode

  to roadkill

  and a decade passed before I knew

  I didn’t give

  permission, the only thing I could control

  was my reaction: wide-eyed, limp,

  maybe a gasp, maybe a sigh

  When the possum plays dead, it enters

  a shock stage

  It plays such a convincing part

  that people have discovered possums this way

  and buried them alive

  Comatose, its glands produce rotting scents

  Green mucus shrouds its body

  to repel predators

  The laws of predation know

  a carcass can’t be harmed

  the same way a living thing can

  Even a predator is afraid of a dead

  body in the dark

  And then the possum lies still

  on an empty road, under stars or pine trees

  she’ll never see,

  until eventually a car comes speeding down the highway

  and kills her, this time for real.

  from The Kenyon Review

  FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ Provincetown

  Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack

  as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks,

  not black rock or islands of fog rising individual

  in a barrenness of salt. It is not that

  it was not beautiful, but that I tried to conjure

  its momentous light, eternal

  that is inside the ordinary, and couldn’t. If I look

  backwards, the mysteries forming themselves

  in darkness, I remember

  the heaviness of heat.

  A soporific wave lifting from concrete.

  There was more a strangeness

  in the dark square of water lifting

  from a mallard having submerged,

  like the sun into water, than there was

  to that wooden place. But to think of it

  in exile, in its solitude of water,

  to see it turn significant

  against what could destroy it,

  it was then I saw myself becoming it.

  from The Common

  HANNAH MARSHALL This Is a Love Poem to Trees

  To the sour cherry tree behind our apartment, that summer I made pie and jam.

  To the water oak on the coast when you were home waiting, and I said, Just one more day.

  To the silver maple that waved bare branches twisting gray, when I cried in my childhood bedroom. You and the tree, holding me.

  To the linden the summer I was pregnant, and wouldn’t that have been a great name for a boy?

  Remember that time a raccoon climbed the white pine and built a nest in our dormer, how we wished we could befriend her? The trap in the morning, the drive to the lake, her furry waddle into the woods.

  To the woods.

  To the tulip tree that wept in early summer, in the new town. The long afternoons I spent alone, drinking tea.

  To branches of the old apple tree, alight in your parents’ fireplace.

  To the weeping willow in Minnesota spring, when I would go for walks and come home, and find you there.

  To the mangled green ash outside the window where I sat with our hungry infant. You changed her diapers, and we forgot to touch each other.

  To the southern magnolia scenting our neighborhood in Illinois, its fallen leaves brittle as eggshell.

  To the bare hickories on our anniversary, ice cream in January, cool sheets and us, alone.

  To the hackberry, Siberian elm, river birch, redbud, cottonwood, and aspen. I’ve loved them all.

  To every year the trees grew without us noticing.

  from New Ohio Review

  SHANE MCCRAE The Hastily Assembled Angel on Care and Vitality

  The hastily assembled angel watches

  From the air he watches from that point in the air

  Where years from now the apex of the pyra-

  mid he is watching being built will be

  Invisibly he watches as slaves roll

  Huge stones from the quarry to the pyramid the

  Slave who invented the method for moving

  The stones is dead the stones that were too big

  For human beings to move the angel saw

  The slave was killed for attempting to correct

  The implementation of his method which

  The Egyptian engineers had not at first

  Completely understood though even as

  His dark blood made the dirt beside them dark

  They saw the first board buckle beneath the weight

  Of the first stone fortunately the slave had


  Explained his method often to his fellow

  Slaves and they could when they were ordered to

  Silently make it work the angel sees the

  Slaves serve their masters most efficiently

  When they aren’t talking to each other but

  They serve their masters most quickly just after

  They have devised a plan to kill their masters

  from The Yale Review

  LUPE MENDEZ There Is Only You

  That newborn baby smell lingers on my hands palo santo and tap water, molcajete and sábila—and I am now a father. Soy padre. Y ahora el desvelo aparece en los empujones de mi hija. Su voz un parpado de luz. Ave María—esa Luz María, esa mi Lucha, esa mi Lucha, esa es mi lucha.

  And I give the baby to my mother and Luz María lets out a bostezo

  and I see her, I hear

  her, I see her, my mother laughs a hard laugh, and mi Lucha wiggles

  out a smile.

  When I walk my parents out of the NICU, my father takes out his flip phone, yes a goddamn flip phone, dials our house in Mejico. ¿Quiúbole padre?, oiga, ahora sí, tenemos raíces acá—nació la herencia, nació la nación y es niña.

  My grandfather, que en paz descanse tells me, viejo, guarda ese sentimiento—y que la virgen y los cuatro vientos la protege siempre.

  I feel his hand on the back of my neck. I close my eyes for a moment, and I am now entre la luna y mis cerros, the smell of wet earth fills my lungs. For the first time in my life, my heart skips a beat. Mi jefe le dice a mi abuelo, we are bound to this land. This is now his home.

  When I walk them to the car, all the words leave me. They speak of when I was a baby and I just listen. All I do now is listen to the coo in my ama’s voice, to the caw in my father’s jaw, to the hum of mi Lucha’s lungs and the rain.

  I am filled with listening.

  from Green Mountains Review

  FRANCINE MERASTY Since Time Immemorial

  I’ve heard these words

  Spoken repeatedly

  As a child